Dr. Nathalie Quion was disturbed by what she observed during a visit to a shelter near the U.S.-Mexico border, where the Trump administration is keeping some of as many as nearly 3,000 children it has taken from migrant parents.
In April, at the request of a local physician who works with children, Quion and a handful of other pediatricians were allowed a brief tour of a large, multistory residential building in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas that had been converted into a shelter. The facility, run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, housed about 70 boys and girls, from infants and toddlers to kids age 12. In an interview, Quion’s voice became strained with emotion as she described what she saw in a room that had about 15 small kids. It was “nap time” for the infants, so some of the babies were sleeping. Typically, a group of toddlers would play together rambunctiously, but these kids were quiet, Quion says. A couple of them used crayons to make color drawings.
Shelter workers shepherded the pediatricians to an outdoor courtyard, where a girl, about age 3, was by herself. Her face was streaked with tears. A staff member said the child, who was quiet at the moment, had been acting out. The staff’s solution was to separate her from the other kids. A shelter staffer in another part of the courtyard watched the girl. It was obvious the girl needed her mother or father. Staff members at the shelter said it’s the facility’s policy to not physically hold any distressed child to comfort him or her — something a parent would typically do, Quion says. “I’ve been practicing [medicine] for 15 years, I tell people I’ve heard a lot of sad stories,” she says. “I thought I was emotionally prepared to go [to the shelter]. I wasn’t. I had nightmares after the visit. I’d wake up at night with images of children crying and no one taking care of them.”
Placing the kids in institutions like shelters and detention centers, rather than in the community with relatives or qualified foster parents, will likely stunt the brain development of younger children and can lead to lifelong health issues, Quion and other pediatricians say. The American Academy of Pediatrics, or AAP, says that migrant children detained by immigration authorities are placed in a variety of government-contracted shelters or large family detention centers that vary widely in size and the level of security they provide. Two of these facilities, both of which are in Texas, are run by for-profit prison corporations. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, has standards regarding the kind of medical, dental and mental health care to be provided in these facilities. “Limited medical, dental and mental health services are provided by the prison corporations in the Texas facilities and through public health services in Pennsylvania [where the government has another large family detention facility],” the AAP says. In a policy statement, the AAP recommends that DHS discontinue the general use of family detention centers and instead use community-based alternatives. Keeping families together in a community setting is better than either separating kids from their parents and putting them in different government-sponsored facilities or keeping families together in such detention centers, Quion says.
[See: 10 Things Pediatricians Advise that Parents Ignore — and Really Shouldn’t.]
Research suggests that kids held in detention facilities are at higher risk of developing an array of chronic conditions, including heart disease, morbid obesity, depression, substance misuse and cancer, says Dr. Colleen A. Kraft, president of the AAP. Younger children may have trouble developing their speech and language skills. Kids taken from their parents and put in institutional settings also may have difficulties in school, with learning problems and issues paying attention in class.
The trauma these children are experiencing is dramatic and could be lifelong, pediatricians say. “It’s horrifying what we’re doing to these kids,” says Kraft, who was among the physicians who toured the shelter in Texas. Taking children away from their parents and placing them in shelters and detention centers is “child abuse,” she says. “The United States is inflicting toxic stress on these children by taking them away from their loving parents.” Toxic stress response “can occur when a child experiences strong, frequent and/or prolonged adversity, such as physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship without adequate adult support,” according to the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.
When kids are placed in institutions apart from their parents, they experience not just emotional but physiological damage, Kraft says. When humans feel threatened, their bodies release the stress hormones adrenaline, norepinephrine and cortisol. The release of these chemicals causes your muscles to contract, speeds up your heart and breath and boosts your blood pressure. Kids release these hormones when they’re anxious, scared or hungry, Kraft says. Their parents typically act as a “buffer” by calming their children in moments of distress. “If that buffer [the parent] is taken away, it can destroy the architecture of their brains in a significant way,” she says. This void can harm a child’s ability to learn, to speak, to understand language and to develop social and emotional bonds. Experiencing toxic stress is like “being on red alert all the time,” Kraft says.
[See: 10 Concerns Parents Have About Their Kids’ Health.]
Being separated from their parents also changes the behavior of children in the short-term in significant ways, studies suggest. For example, infants may become quiet and withdrawn because they’ve learned their cries and distress draw no response from adults, says Nathan A. Fox, director of the Child Development Laboratory at the University of Maryland. “Institutions vary in the quality of their environment,” Fox says. “What most institutions are missing is interaction, the ability for an infant or a child to interact with an adult caregiver, so if they’re upset, the adult caregiver can respond in a warm and reassuring way.” Such interaction is also important in facilitating language and cognitive development. Kids learn they’re not being responded to, “and they withdraw. They learn the caregivers are not being helpful and that they’re being neglected, and that neglect leads to all sorts of negative consequences in terms of their cognitive development, their social and emotional development.” Fox is one of the researchers collaborating on the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a longitudinal study that began in the fall of 2000 and is still ongoing. The project aims to research the effects of early institutionalization on brain and behavior development and examine the effects of a high-quality foster intervention. Researchers studied 136 children in Romanian institutions, assigning half of them to Romanian foster care families. The other half stayed in Romanian facilities. The children ranged in age from 6 months to nearly 3 years.
Children who remained institutionalized had delays in cognitive function, language and motor development. They showed deficits in socio-emotional behaviors and had more psychiatric disorders, according to the research. The kids moved into foster care showed improvements in language, IQ and social and emotional functioning, researchers found. “There appeared to be sensitive periods in development for language, socio-emotional behavior and cognitive development. Children who were taken out early and placed in foster families improved and looked similar to kids in a control group [children who had never been institutionalized],” Fox says.
Many of the children had endured significant trauma even before U.S. immigration authorities separated them from their parents, Kraft says. She notes that a large percentage of the parents and kids are from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, countries ravaged by gang violence. Many parents seeking asylum have said they fled their country in fear for their lives and those of their kids.
Some of the kids’ mothers and fathers had presented themselves to authorities and asked for asylum; others were caught after crossing the border without authorization. The crisis accelerated in May, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance” policy for people caught trying to enter the U.S. without authorization. The fate of children who were then separated from their parents remains mired in chaos and confusion. In late June, a federal judge ordered the government to reunite children under age 5 with their parents by July 10, and all other kids by July 26. But government attorneys in a July 6 court hearing asked the federal judge for more time to get children back together with migrant families. The judge ordered the government to provide a list of names of the 102 children under age 5 to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the government on behalf of the migrant families. The judge said he needed more information before he could decide whether to relax his original deadlines. In a court hearing Monday, government attorneys said they have so far reunited with their parents just two of the 102 children under the age of 5. A government attorney said authorities were preparing to place 54 children under age 5 back with their parents.
[See: 8 Unexpected Signs You’re Stressed.]
It appears the Trump administration didn’t keep comprehensive records of family separations. In many cases, kids and their parents are detained in facilities that are hundreds or thousands of miles from each other. The Trump administration recently disclosed in a federal court hearing that it has deported 19 parents of migrants under the age of 5 who are still in U.S. custody. Overall, the government is currently detaining 102 kids under the age of 5 that federal authorities separated from their parents. Some independent attorneys representing migrants have told reporters they are scrambling on behalf of their clients to locate their children. Attorneys for the federal government said during the hearing they don’t know exactly how many kids in its custody were taken from parents overall because they were described in government databases as individuals and not as part of a family.
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Keeping Migrant Kids in Detention Centers and Shelters Can Damage Them originally appeared on usnews.com
